"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

line of duty.

"See?" Miss Beryl addressed her husband's photograph.

"Ed thinks so too." At least, she comforted herself, when the divine
boom got lowered she be in better financial condition to receive it
than many of her neighbors. She could congratulate herself that she
was not only well insured but reasonably secure. Miss Beryl, like so
many of the owners of the houses along Upper Main, was a widow,
technically not "Miss" Beryl at all, and her husband had left her in
possession of both his VA pension and retirement, which, together with
her own retirement and Social Security, added up, and she knew herself
to be far better off than Mrs. Gruber and the others. life, which in
Miss Beryl's considered opinion tilted in the direction of cruelty, had
at least spared her financial hardship, and she was grateful. 3In
other respects life had been less kind. Her being known in North Bath
as "Miss" Beryl derived from the fact that the militantly unteachable
eighth-grade schoolchildren she'd instructed for forty years considered
her far too odd looking and misshapen to have a husband. They refused

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to believe it, in fact, even when confronted with irrefutable
evidence.

They instinctively called her Miss Peoples or Miss Beryl on the first
day of class and paid no attention when she corrected them. Clive
Sr.

was of the opinion that kids just naturally thought of their teachers
as spinsters, and he had found the whole thing amusing, often referring
to her as "Miss- Beryl" himself. Clive Sr. had not been a profoundly
stupid man, but he missed his fair share of what Miss Beryl referred to
as life's nuances, and one of the nuances he missed was the hurt he
thoughtlessly inflicted on his wife when he called her by that name, a
name that suggested he saw her the same way other people did. Clive
Sr. was the only man who'd ever treated Miss Beryl as desirable, and
it seemed to her almost unforgivable that he should, without thinking,
take back the gift of his love for her in this one small way, take it
back repeatedly, always with a big grin. But he had loved her. This
she knew, and the knowledge was another of the ways she was better off
than most other neighbors, whose husbands, when they died, left their
widows alone and largely unprepared for another decade or two of
solitary existence. Mrs. Gruber, for instance, had never worked
outside the home and had little notion how the world operated beyond
the obvious fact that it was getting more expensive. Indeed, Miss
Beryl was the only professional woman among these frightened Upper Main
Street widows. Alive, their husbands had protected them from life's
falling limbs, but now their veteran's benefits and meager Social